As a child, Steve Watkins was shocked to learn from a librarian that books don’t appear like magic. They are actually written – by people.
“As dumb as it may sound,” he told Front Porch Fredericksburg magazine, “I thought books just were.”
Now a UMW professor of English and an award-winning novelist, Watkins got another kind of literary surprise in December as one of four fiction writers to receive a $5,000 fellowship from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. The award recognizes and supports pursuit of artistic excellence.
Watkins won acclaim for The Black O: Racism and Redemption in an American Corporate Empire, his 1997 nonfiction account of America’s largest employment discrimination class-action lawsuit. Since then, he has produced a steady stream of celebrated fiction, including the short-story collection and Paterson Fiction Prize finalist My Chaos Theory in 2006 and the Golden Kite Award-winning Down Sand Mountain in 2009. He also wrote the young adult novels What Comes After, which was published last spring, and Juvie, which is due out next year.
Watkins works in child advocacy as an investigator for CASA, Court Appointed Special Advocates, and is an Ashtanga yoga instructor. He earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from Florida State University, and he teaches journalism, creative writing, and Vietnam War literature at Mary Washington.